After coming across an article about an organization called the Thanks-Giving Square, I decided to take a look at the organization's homepage (www.thanksgiving.org).

The Thanks-Giving Square mission statement proclaims its purpose to be: "To offer a place for all people to give thanks to God. To witness, to celebrate, and to promote the value and spirit of thanksgiving for both sacred and secular cultures throughout the world."

In the spirit of gratitude, I thank Thanks-Giving Square for germinating in my mind an idea for a new celebration, which might make a world of difference, perhaps even more than Thanksgiving. I propose the creation of the "Unholiday."

Unholiday is a celebration of thought over faith, of proof over pure speculation.

Unholiday is about asking questions rather than assuming answers.

Unholiday is about being thankful for those among mankind who have strengthened us through their discoveries and insights, rather than thankfulness to totalitarian sky gods, who have only brought a rain of tears- whether from their imaginary promises, or the very real tears of the persecuted blasphemers, heretics, and anti-christs.

I can understand that some wouldn't like such a celebration. Some will think if they believe so very much that God is Good, and repeat this a few hundred times all of history will change, and the Universe we see might actually reflect the influence of a benevolent God.

More likely, they will be able to fool themselves, I suppose, and attribute to God all that is good in their lives, and leave the question of evil to those who claim to have God's e-mail address.

Actually, I think I will solve all of the world's problems this instant. God you are so much greater than the greatest greatness we might conceive of if our conceptions of you were of the greatest conception. I ask you please with as much sugar on top as if the earth's seas were filled seven times over with sugar- no actually, if the entire Milky Way were filled with tooth-rotting white cane.

God must have an insatiable sweet tooth, as he has not saw fit by my saying of these words to put an end to malnutrition, cancer, birth defects, impoverishment, mental illness, and all the other maladies of the human condition.

But that, of course, will change. For holinesses from around the world are gathering to work their magic. You see, in asking God I wasn't sincere. But clearly the combined sincerity of so many Holy men (and maybe a woman or two if conditions allow), with the added efficacy the innumerable sacred rites (if any of them worked it would seem odd to need any others) of the sacred religions with their ever so sacred (fictional?) histories- that should do the trick. What- you don't believe me?

Haven't you read the horoscopes for this week? The forecast is clear sunny skies, for the light of the divine will shine down (at least for Sagittarius- God's Chosen people for the week).

I have a prediction, of course, maybe a little more founded than astrology, or the predictions of similarly vague exponents of Thanksgiving.

God will not cure a single one of our maladies without creating the question of if the cure is worse than the disease. His promise, however many times broken by common sense and common experience, is of a cure-all nature. His deeds, as evidenced by his all too human followers, are of a cure-nothing nature.

Science and rational thinking will solve, and have solved some of our maladies. By trying to see the world as it is, and not as we most wish it to be, there is the possibility of alleviating some of the collective tooth-ache of mankind, so often provoked by the sugary and yet nutritionally defunct dogmas of the Great Religions of the Great God Almighty.

And maybe, just mayhap, that's something to celebrate.